Computer simulation of PFC circuits

Although there are well known advantages of using CAD, there are some drawbacks with a general purpose electronic circuit simulator. These include the long simulation time which is needed for switching circuits and problems with infinite error looping in simulating complicated circuitry. For this reason, simulation of a power factor correction (PFC) circuit becomes quite impractical using standard CAD software. This is especially true for time domain transient simulation. In order to speed up the computation time and make PFC circuit simulation possible, the approach proposed is to describe the operating function of PFC by mathematical expressions, then write this mathematical model as a computer program. These mathematical expressions are further processed with additional practical knowledge and engineering assumptions about PFC. In principle, instead of using a small step increment to find the correct turn on duty-ratio, the “fast time domain algorithm” allows the duty-ratio to be found in a single step program loop. The programming language used is “C”. This has reduced the simulation time from hours to seconds